Whenever I asked my late Father what he was doing on D Day, he would say he was flying over Alaska. He would always clam up when I asked why he was flying over Alaska or where he was headed. Even 40 odd years later, he did not want to talk about the war.
When he died in 1990, my sister and I found all his medals, the purple heart being the only one we recognized. I have no idea if he won a medal of honor or what his other medals meant. My sister still has them.
Many vets made it home without being awarded the medals they had coming. Why?
They were Black Soldiers.
Waverly Woodson was a medic who spent 30 hours on Omaha Beach treating other soliders while being injured himself. He still has not been given a medal of honor.
Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) has announced this week Woodson will receive the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest medal.
There were 432 medals of honor awarded during WWII, none going to a Black soldier, though roughly 1 million Black Americans served in the war.
“The awards process was tainted with racial overtones,” one of the commission’s authors, Shaw University international relations professor Daniel Gibran, said at the time.
The military was still segregated during WWII and racism reared its ugly head in what jobs Black soldiers were allowed to perform, mostly support staff, rarely officers in charge of other soldiers.
Ironically, France brought 3 veterans to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of the war, Waverly Woodson being one of them. As Woodson later said, “I don’t know why they chose me, but it was a wonderful thing. I was the only Black man of the three. I think it was the French’s way of saying, “Thanks”
After the end of the war, Woodson hoped to study medicine but was not allowed to because no medical school would admit him. He studied Biology and, when recalled during the Korean War, he trained other medics and running an Army morgue at Walter Reed Medical Center. Later, he worked at the National Navel Medical Center and spent more than 20 years in the clinical pathology department at the National Institutes of Health, retiring in 1980.
He passed in 2005 and is buried in Arlington Cemetery, not even being awarded the Bronze Star, which he was notified he had been awarded, but still no medal.
Woodson’s family, his widow Joann and son Steve say our governments oversight bothered him, “It was very prevalent during WWII that soldiers of color got zero recognition. He was more disappointed than anything. He never had ill feelings to the Army as a whole. It was a product of the time.”
We need to do better.
Oh, rec list, thanks everyone. Thanks everyone for your stories. As the poll shows, when the people who lived thru it pass on, the younger generations tend to forget, allowing Fascism to try to rise again.